Start-up Procket Networks names CEO

A Redback Networks executive will take the helm of secretive Silicon Valley
start-up
Procket Networks.

Randall Kruep, formerly Redback's
senior vice president of worldwide customer operations, will become Procket's new chief executive and
president in March. He will replace co-founder Sharad Mehrotra, who will
continue as chairman.

Procket has created a buzz in
the networking business because of its management team of former Cisco
Systems and Sun Microsystems engineers--and because the company has quietly
been building what some sources believe is next-generation networking equipment that can take
on Cisco and Juniper Networks.

Procket, which has raised $34 million in venture capital, was co-founded by
Tony Li, a former Cisco and Juniper engineer who created some of the key
technologies for those companies. The two-year-old start-up was also
co-founded by former Sun engineers Mehrotra and William Lynch, who designed
forthcoming versions of Sun's flagship UltraSparc processors.

Kruep's hiring as CEO will allow the three co-founders to continue
developing their product, said Mehrotra in an interview.

"Randall is a topnotch sales executive and brings broad experience as a
seasoned executive to take us to the next level," said Mehrotra. "Tony,
(William), and I are highly technical. Think of us as high-class technical
nerds. And the product we're working on has tremendous opportunities for us
to keep contributing technically. There's no shortage of work."

With Kruep on board, Procket will have an experienced executive who at
Redback helped turn a networking start-up into a successful business. Redback, one of many networking
start-ups that splashed onto Wall Street with successful public offerings,
found a niche four years ago by building networking hardware that lets
telecommunications service providers offer high-speed Net access through
cable or digital subscriber line (DSL).

Mehrotra declined to state what Procket is building and when the company
will go public with its product plans.

While Procket has remained quiet, sources believe the two-year-old start-up
has good potential because they believe the company is building new
high-speed routers, which telecommunications service provides use in their
networks to handle the explosion of Net traffic. Routers send Internet
traffic over a network at high speeds.

Cisco and Juniper are the two dominant players in the
fast-growing high-end router market, which is expected to reach $2.1
billion in sales this year and $12 billion by 2003, according to market
research company RHK.